Teaching with Heart and Soul: Reflections on Spirituality in Teacher Education by Parker J
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Teaching with Heart and Soul: Reflections on Spirituality in Teacher Education By Parker J. Palmer I. The Story of Mr. Porter Public education is a political battlefield on which both teachers and children are at risk, especially children who live on the margins of our society. As I try to understand how teachers can protect their own integrity amid these dangers—so they can help protect the integrity of children, and of education itself—I return time and again to the memoirs of a man who grew up in Harlem during the 1920's and 30's. He writes about the hardships of being a child in that time and place, about the poverty and despair that surrounded his young life, about the price that he and his community paid for the racism of American society. But he also writes about sources of light that illumined his future in the midst of what he calls "dark times". Several public school teachers are at the top of his list, most notably… …the never-to-be-forgotten Mr. Porter, my black math teacher, who soon gave up any attempt to teach me math. I had been born, apparently, with some kind of deformity that resulted in a total inability to count. From arithmetic to geometry, I never passed a single test. Porter took his failure very well and compensated for it by helping me run the school magazine. He assigned me a story about Harlem for this magazine, a story that he insisted demanded serious research. Porter took me downtown to the main branch of the public library at Forty-second Street and waited for me while I began my research. He was very proud of the story I eventually turned in. But I was so terrified that afternoon that I vomited all over his shoes in the subway. The teachers I am talking about accepted my limits. I could begin to accept them without shame. I could trust them when they suggested the possibilities open to me… I was an exceedingly shy, withdrawn, and uneasy student. Yet my teachers somehow made me believe that I could learn. And when I could scarcely see for myself any future at all, my teachers told me that the future was mine. 1 Those lines (not least, the feisty assertion that "Porter took his failure very well…"), speak deeply to me about the theme of this issue: teaching in ways "that enhance the human condition and advance social justice." Those lines fill me with gratitude for all the Mr. Porter-like teachers who serve in American classrooms today. And they make me wonder how we can educate even more teachers of the sort Mr. Porter was. www.CourageRenewal.org 1 I feel certain that Mr. Porter knew mathematics well. I feel certain that Mr. Porter taught many students how to do math. But Mr. Porter's self-definition as a teacher was not confined to his job description. He never stopped asking the most important question a teacher can ask: who is this child, and how can I nurture his or her gifts? We owe Mr. Porter a great debt of gratitude for these qualities of his heart and soul. For the student he guided toward writing was none other than the young James Baldwin, who went on to become one of the greatest writers of any time and any place. II. Spirituality in Education As James Baldwin tells it, the story of Mr. Porter contains no spiritual language. But it is, I believe, a story about spirituality in public education. "Spirituality" is an elusive word with a variety of definitions—some compelling, some wifty, some downright dangerous. The definition I have found most helpful is simply this: spirituality is the eternal human yearning to be connected with something larger than our own egos. That definition does not solve the complex problems associated with the spiritual impulse: people can and do get connected with things that are death-dealing rather than life-giving, as witness the Third Reich. But it performs a key function of any good definition by giving us a place from which to launch an exploration. And—if my own experience as a teacher is any measure—it also gives us some insight into Mr. Porter's spiritual life. Mr. Porter, like most of us who teach, must have felt pressure to conform to the expectations that came from his training, his role, his employer, his community, or from the policies governing schooling in his place and time. Falling into line with such external standards and expectations always tempts the human ego, with its incessant need to look good in the eyes of others. How easy it would have been for Mr. Porter to do no more than teach math, avoiding the risks involved in truly teaching a child. A spiritual crisis arises when we find ourselves in the grip of something larger than society's expectations or the ego's needs—something like Mr. Porter's instinct that behind young James Baldwin's mathematical ineptitude was a gift of another kind. The challenge of such a crisis is always clear, though finding a way through never is: do we follow the soul's calling, or do we bend to the forces of deformation around us and within us? Challenges of this sort are well-known to many teachers these days as they seem some way to negotiate between the demands of high-stakes testing and the deeper needs of their students. So we have much to learn from Mr. Porter, whose spirituality connected him to that largeness called the life of a child—a connection that may well have pitted him, heart and soul, against ego-seducing educational and social conventions of all sorts. I know that "heart and soul" rhetoric is regarded as passé, or worse, by some critics in our post-modernist world. This is not the place for a rebuttal of post-modernist 2 www.CourageRenewal.org thought—for which we can all be grateful—but I do want to make two points about the language I am using and where it comes from. First, the core human reality that "heart and soul" language points to has been given many names by diverse traditions. Hasidic Jews call it the spark of the divine in every being. Christians may call it spirit, though some (e.g., the Quakers) call it the inner teacher, and Thomas Merton (a Trappist monk) called it true self. Secular humanists call it identity and integrity. Depth psychologists call it the outcome of individuation. And there are common idioms for it in everyday speech, as when we say of someone we know and care about, "He just isn't himself these days", or, "She seems to have found herself." What one names this core of the human being is of no real consequence to me, since no one can claim to know its true name. But that one names it is, I believe, crucial. For "it" is the ontological reality of being human that keeps us from regarding ourselves, our colleagues or our students as raw material to be molded into whatever form serves the reigning economic or political regime. Second, even though I spent most of the sixties in Berkeley, I did not learn about the powers of heart and soul sitting in a hot tub in northern California. I have learned about them over the years by drawing as close as someone like me can to the experience of oppressed people. I mean people who, by definition, have had every external form of power stripped from them: they have no money, no status, no access to influence, no heavily armed nation-state. How have such "powerless" people managed to foment deep-reaching social change in so many parts of the globe—from Eastern Europe to Latin America, from South Africa to the black liberation movement in our own country? By drawing upon and deploying the only power that cannot be taken from us: the power of the human soul, the human spirit, the human heart. Far from being socially and politically regressive, "heart and soul" language, rightly understood, is one of the most radical rhetorics we have. Despite our cultural bias that all power resides in the outward, visible world, history offers ample evidence that the inward and invisible powers of the human spirit can have at least equal impact on our individual and collective lives. That simple fact is one that our educational institutions ignore at their—and our—peril. III. Can We Educate the Soul? Are we doing enough to educate more teachers like Mr. Porter? Not if all we offer teachers-in-training is disciplinary content and pedagogical technique. Of course, these are important matters that must be taken seriously, sometimes much more seriously than they are. But the key to Mr. Porter's teacherly gift was not his technical mastery—it was his mastery of his own inner life. Mr. Porter refused to be bound by subject matter and www.CourageRenewal.org 3 methods, and he never lost sight of the fact that his true vocation was to teach not mathematics but a child. If we want to help teachers-in-training understand their vocation in depth, we must uproot our tacit belief that "Teachers like Mr. Porter are not made, but born." Consciously or unconsciously, we are wedded to the notion that, while higher education can stock people's minds with facts and theories, and train them in skillful means, it cannot help them grow larger hearts and souls.